...for he is like a refiner's fire... and he shall sit as a refiner and purifier... and purge (me) as gold and silver, that (I) may offer to the Lord an offering in righteousness. I must receive into the depths of my heart the searching scrutiny of God which removes the dross of selfishness, sin and judgement that I may praise His name forever.

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He shall cover thee with His feathers, and under His wings shalt thou find refuge: His truth is a shield and bucklerPsalms 91:4

Be it ours,when we cannot see the face of God, to trust under the shadow of His wings. C.H. Spugeon

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Faith; Again

Faith, the object and focus of Christian life. Faith is an indeterminate aspect of our existent. It is also that which provides the substance for action in the Christian life. It may be said that faith is our religion, apart from God, an idol formed by Christians to assuage life's uncertainties and remove the 'question' (whatever the 'question' is for you) from life. We use faith to override our indecisiveness and provide sanity to face the vagaries and absurdities of existence. We desire in relationship with a sovereign and omnipotent Authority to have certain assurances and guarantees, by association with, and reliance upon. We seek to have infallibility. Life operates in contradiction to that viewpoint, creating disharmony. Faith is in question as an automatic occurrence of decision-making, there exists no place of absolute certainty in life's course. In fact, even if we will not admit, we make decisions with the best information at hand, knowing that absolute certainty will never be attained. Faith becomes in Christian context a mental exercise by which we use faith as the fulcrum point of a lever in order to posture a decision to a point where we can live with the uncertainty and lack of guarantee and believe that we are in accordance with the will of God. In this there is an exclusion of doubt, and whether it is the truth as a place of peace with God or a levering of the weight of the decision to placate anxiety, there has to be a removal of the absurdity of the ambiguous, the element of the indistinct, the essence of 'question'.

Faith is an antagonist, it sets itself against the norms of this world, it stands against rationalism, it is set apart from common sense, it is unnatural, it is anti-impulsive.Faith is revelatory, spiritual, inspirational. Faith is active, always; instrumental, constantly; trying, pervasively; testing, incessantly; personal, ideally; purifying, wholly; life-changing, practically; senseless,truthfully; working, actually; possessive, not without a fight; living; difficult; it is the alchemy of the soul, the reality of revelation. Faith declares God and maintains that the worth of life, the declaration of the clarity of God's character in my mind, is found in relationship with Him through the power of Jesus Christ and His indwelling of me. "Without faith it is impossible to please Him." Hebrews 11:6